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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.
For the past couple of years I have collected autumn leaves that have freshly fallen. I usually tuck them in the pages of a book and they become pleasant little surprises when I open a leafed book. This year I was going to do that and photograph them using a great ultra macro lens I bought for my Nikon camera. I picked up vibrant or interesting leaves, set them on my dining room table that has become my mini photo studio, and...nothing. Within a few hours the leaves dry and shrivel. Plus, that great lens is less great because I have cataracts and I can't see well enough to closely focus on whatever I put in front of that lens. But, I can use a different lens and take pictures of leaves that are still attached to a tree. This one was taken in October when I went on a photo trip to the Leelenau Peninsula. The leaves are importantly predictable. They mark the beginnings of withering daylight and hard cold that eventually slips gently into longer days and green. I hate the cold and the dark. I sang 4 concerts this past weekend, fully masked. There were 80 of us onstage, shoulder to shoulder. We were all masked and vaccinated, but Omicron now stands in the wings. Who knows when it will enter and how it will change us. The leaves loosened by fading sunlight and cold temperatures are predictable and at least dazzle us with color. Covid isn't predictable and it doesn't dazzle.
December 8, 2021
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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.
For the second Pandemic year we just celebrated Passover-for-two on Zoom, separated from other seder participants by distance and screen. Our dining room table was still overflowing with beautiful china and symbolic foods, but we couldn’t share our bounty because we were alone in our home, far from our family and friends. And yet, I still made charoses for a crowd. Charoses (or, the Sephardic pronunciation, “charoset”) is the apple-walnut-wine concoction which resembles the mortar of the bricks our forefathers had to use to build the pyramids in Egypt. The story is that the Jews were slaves in Egypt. Because we worked so hard to be free, we should live and work for the liberation of all people. My charoses is made with apples, walnuts, sweet kosher wine, cinnamon sugar, and nutmeg (my secret ingredient). I forgot to add honey this year. It was still terrifically delicious. It is always a patchke (pahtch-key) to make this Passover treat. The food processor and the counter around it end up covered in sticky apple juice drippings, requiring hot soapy water to fully clean the prep space. First I chop the walnuts and add them to the mixing bowl. Then I add apple to the spinning processor, about 2-3 apples at a time. Then, all of the cinnamon sugar in the house, plus a bit more, plus plenty of sweet kosher wine. Cover the bowl and shake it up, and let it sit in the fridge for a day before the seder meal. I’ll make some more today. Enough to last through the final days of this 8-day festival. This is a sweet treat through the 8 days of bleak, flat foods like matzo and other yeast-less products. Our private celebration of deliciousness in the dark days of pandemic plagues.
April 9, 2021